It is the beginning of a new year and the time when you see thousands of posts about New Year Resolutions, about the fact that 2021 was the best or the worst year ever, and about 2022 being the best yet to come. But, statistics show that by the middle of February, and this happens every year, these resolutions start to fade away because, it is easy to declare them but actually hard to implement them. Beyond your New Year Resolutions, I am telling you that the Metaverse is here to stay so it is something to pay very close attention this year.
The Metaverse is a parallel world which is entirely built online where everybody, absolutely everybody can participate. No matter who you are in the real life, your avatars in the Metaverse can be your fittest, wealthiest, smartest versions of yourself. You can have brands creating shoes for your metaverse self and companies creating cars to meet your virtual tastes. The Metaverse is not something new, it has existed for years in the gaming world but it has become mainstream with the development of NFTs, and the fact that Facebook has rebranded all operations under the umbrella name Meta.
There will be hundreds, and thousands of projects which will aim to build the Metaverse, some of them will succeed wildly, but the majority will fail. I believe that the majority will have their own tokens in the crypto world, which will put in discussion the question, which projects are the best to invest money in? Of course, this article is not intended to be financial advice so how I would advise you to approach it would be to first dip your toes into the Metaverse. Do some research about the most popular Metaverse projects, create accounts, avatars, and start involving yourself, playing, and understanding what is happening there. Once you start to understand what is happening in this virtual world, because it has a learning curve, like everything else, it will be much easier to make decisions.
Next, search for the best Telegram & Discord groups around this topic. Be aware that most of the groups around the projects will promote the projects. So don’t look at what the admins are posting, look at what the members are discussing, to understand more about this fairly new market. Pay attention to the news, the trends, and look beyond the hype. The marketing materials of most projects, and the Metaverse ones are are created by highly skilled freelancers and agencies so they will look appealing, and if you are in the target market of the project you will feel like they are reading your mind.
They will say what you want to hear, and they will function just like the detergent commercials. And it is normal, this is the scope of marketing. But, if you have some disposable funds, and are thinking about investing in certain tokens, you need to go way beyond the hype and perform due diligence. The best way to start is to analyze the team behind the project. In most cases you will find a team page, and in many cases there will be links to Linkedin, Twitter, and other social media profiles. Look at what these people did before in terms of projects and career-path. Some Linkedin profiles can be fake so perform Google searches, and also get in touch with team members. If the team in anonymous, well, my advice is to stay away. I am involved in a number of projects as team member, co-founder or advisor, and I never hidden my identity, and always stood up behind the projects both in good, and bad moments.
Next, look at the business model of the platform, is there any innovation in terms of technical or business-related innovation? While play to earn is becoming a huge thing, think about how many platforms are launched, or in the process of launching using the same model? Where is all this money coming from? You have to ask yourself this. If the only revenue stream is from money poured in by new users, well, there is a word called “ponzi” which sooner or later will hit, and potentially knock-down the project.
When Facebook did the move to Meta, we, marketers, understood that the social media goes to the Metaverse, this is the trend of the market and this will happen with you or without you, the same way the sun goes up in the morning. So my question is very simple: do you want to involve and benefit from it or be left-out?
